President Woolsey, in his Historical Discourse pronounced before the Graduates of Yale College, August 14th, 1850, makes the following remarks on this subject:  “The original motives for setting up a buttery in colleges seem to have been, to put the trade in articles which appealed to the appetite into safe hands; to ascertain how far students were expensive in their habits, and prevent them from running into debt; and finally, by providing a place where drinkables of not very stimulating qualities were sold, to remove the temptation of going abroad after spirituous liquors.  Accordingly, laws were passed limiting the sum for which the Butler might give credit to a student, authorizing the President to inspect his books, and forbidding him to sell anything except permitted articles for ready money.  But the whole system, as viewed from our position as critics of the past, must be pronounced a bad one.  It rather tempted the student to self-indulgence by setting up a place for the sale of things to eat and drink within the College walls, than restrained him by bringing his habits under inspection.  There was nothing to prevent his going abroad in quest of stronger drinks than could be bought at the buttery, when once those which were there sold ceased to allay his thirst.  And a monopoly, such as the Butler enjoyed of certain articles, did not tend to lower their price, or to remove suspicion that they were sold at a higher rate than free competition would assign to them.”—­pp. 44, 45.

“When,” says the Gradus ad Cantabrigiam, “the ’punishment obscene,’ as Cowper, the poet, very properly terms it, of flagellation, was enforced at our University, it appears that the Buttery was the scene of action.  In The Poor Scholar, a comedy, written by Robert Nevile, Fellow of King’s College in Cambridge, London, 1662, one of the students having lost his gown, which is picked up by the President of the College, the tutor says, ’If we knew the owner, we ‘d take him down to th’ Butterie, and give him due correction.’  To which the student, (aside,) ’Under correction, Sir; if you’re for the Butteries with me, I’ll lie as close as Diogenes in dolio.  I’ll creep in at the bunghole, before I’ll mount a barrel,’ &c. (Act II.  Sc. 6.)—­Again:  ’Had I been once i’ th’ Butteries, they’d have their rods about me.  But let us, for joy that I’m escaped, go to the Three Tuns and drink a pint of wine, and laugh away our cares.—­’T is drinking at the Tuns that keeps us from ascending Buttery barrels,’ &c.”  By a reference to the word PUNISHMENT, it will be seen that, in the older American colleges, corporal punishment was inflicted upon disobedient students in a manner much more solemn and imposing, the students and officers usually being present.